I remain very grateful to Brill Academic Publishers, founded in 1683, for taking the entrepreneurial risk to realise this project. My sincere thanks go to Franca de Kort and Fem Eggers (both Leiden) for ensuring that this edition of the Yearbook could see the light of day.
My deepfelt thanks go to the members of the editorial board – Linnéa Gelot (Stockholm), Cheryl Hendricks (Cape Town), Gilbert M. Khadiagala (Johannesburg), Paul Nugent (Edinburgh), and Thomas K. Tieku (London, Ontario) – for keeping an eye on quality and guiding me when necessary. Following a workshop with members of the editorial board and contributors to the Yearbook on the African Union (Cape Town, South Africa, 23–24 March 2023), we have continued in 2024 our efforts to develop the quality of the yearbook again.
The book reviews section has once again been very carefully compiled by Jens Herpolsheimer (Leipzig). I owe him for a great selection of titles and reviewers and the critical accompaniment on this journey since 2021. Forrest Kilimnik and Duc Tran (both Leipzig) have once done a great job at copy-editing. Pleasure working with all of you! And as always, I take the remaining mistakes on my head. And thank you, Melanie Judge (Cape Town), for sharing an important information on the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights. Furthermore, I am deeply indebted to my unnamed colleagues in the AU Commission, some of whom I have had the pleasure of working with since 2006.
Furthermore, I acknowledge generous funding by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under a grant for the research network ‘African Non-Military Conflict Intervention Practices’ (2022–2026) as well as the German Research Foundation (DFG) for the grant on interregionalism between the African Union, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), and the European Union (EU) in the context of the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 1199: ‘Processes of Spatialization under the Global Condition’ (2016–2024). Both grants allowed me to continue travelling to Addis Ababa and other places on the continent and keep up the dialogue with practitioners and other scholars.
Convinced that the Yearbook on the African Union will stimulate debate among both academics and practitioners, I would be very grateful if these responses would enable the editorial team to improve the product and help ensure that this endeavour is sustainable and intellectually fruitful. Any constructive feedback is most welcome at: uengel@uni-leipzig.de
Ulf Engel